Derived terms

Translations

about the
social science Anthropology (/ˌænθɹəˈpɒlədʒi/, from Greek: ἄνθρωπος, anthropos,
"human being"; and λόγος, logos, "reason" or "speech," lit.
to talk about human beings) is the study of humanity.
Anthropology has origins in the natural
sciences, the humanities, and the social
sciences. Ethnography is
both one of its primary methods and the text that is written as a
result of the practice of anthropology and its elements.

Since the work of Franz Boas and
Bronisław
Malinowski in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, social
anthropology has been distinguished from other social science
disciplines by its emphasis on in-depth examination of context,
cross-cultural
comparisons (socio-cultural anthropology is by nature a
comparative discipline), and the importance it places on long-term,
experiential immersion in the area of research, often known as
participant-observation.
Cultural anthropology in particular has emphasized cultural
relativity and the use of findings to frame cultural critiques.
This has been particularly prominent in the United States, from
Boas's arguments against 19th-century racial ideology, through
Margaret
Mead's advocacy for gender equality and sexual liberation, to
current criticisms of post-colonial
oppression and promotion of multiculturalism.

Historical and institutional context

The anthropologist
Eric
Wolf once described anthropology as "the most scientific of the
humanities, and the most humanistic of the sciences." Contemporary
anthropologists claim a number of earlier thinkers as their
forebears, and the discipline has several sources; Claude
Lévi-Strauss, for example, claimed Montaigne and
Rousseau
as important influences.

Ancient and medieval writers and scholars may be
considered forerunners of anthropology, insofar as they conducted
or wrote detailed studies of the customs of different peoples,
including the Greek writer Herodotus, often called the "father of
history" and the Roman historian Tacitus, who wrote many of our
only surviving contemporary accounts of several ancient Celtic and
Germanic peoples. A candidate for one of the first scholars to
carry out comparative ethnographic-type studies in person was the
medieval Persian
scholar
Abū Rayhān al-Bīrūnī in the 11th century, who wrote about the
peoples, customs, and religions of the Indian
subcontinent, and wrote detailed comparative studies on the
religions and cultures in the Middle East,
Mediterranean
and South
Asia. None of these scholars' activities, however, led to the
establishment of a sustained tradition of comparative study of
customs, beliefs, and the ways that human behavior and experience
are shaped by participation in a particular group of people with a
shared history.

Most scholars consider modern anthropology as an
outgrowth of the Age of
Enlightenment, a period when Europeans attempted systematically
to study human behavior, the known varieties of which had been
increasing since the 15th century as a result of the
first European colonization wave. The traditions of jurisprudence, history, philology, and sociology then evolved into
something more closely resembling the modern views of these
disciplines and informed the development of the social
sciences, of which anthropology was a part. Developments in
systematic study of ancient civilizations through the disciplines
of Classics and
Egyptology
informed both archaeology and eventually social anthropology, as
did the study of East and South Asian languages and cultures. At
the same time, the Romantic
reaction to the Enlightenment produced thinkers, such as Johann
Gottfried Herder and later Wilhelm
Dilthey, whose work formed the basis for the "culture concept,"
which is central to the discipline.

E. B.
Tylor ( 2 October1832 –
2
January1917) and James George
Frazer ( 1 January1854 –
7 May1941) are
generally considered the antecedents to modern social
anthropology in Britain. Though Tylor undertook a field trip to
Mexico, both
he and Frazer derived most of the material for their comparative
studies through extensive reading not fieldwork: Classics
(literature and history of Greece and Rome), the work of the early
European folklorists, and reports from missionaries, travelers, and
contemporaneous ethnologists. Tylor advocated strongly for
unilinealism and a form of "uniformity of mankind". Tylor in
particular laid the groundwork for theories of cultural
diffusionism, stating that there are three ways that different
groups can have similar cultural forms or technologies:
"independent invention, inheritance from ancestors in a distant
region, transmission from one race [sic] to another." Tylor
formulated one of the early and influential anthropological
conceptions of culture
as "that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art,
morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired
by man as a member of society." However, as Stocking notes, Tylor
mainly concerned himself with describing and mapping the
distribution of particular elements of culture, rather than with
the larger function, and generally seemed to assume a Victorian
idea of progress rather than the idea of non-directional,
multilineal cultural development proposed by later anthropologists.
Tylor also theorized about the origins of religious feelings in
human beings, proposing a theory of animism as the earliest stage,
and noting that "religion" has many components, of which he
believed the most important to be belief in supernatural beings (as
opposed to moral systems, cosmology, etc.). Frazer, a Scottish
scholar with a broad knowledge of Classics, also concerned himself
with religion, myth, and magic. His comparative studies, most
influentially in the numerous editions of The Golden
Bough, analyzed similarities in religious belief and symbolism
worldwide.

Neither Tylor nor Frazer, however, were
particularly interested in fieldwork, nor were they
interested in examining how the cultural elements and institutions
fit together. Toward the turn of the twentieth century, a number of
anthropologists became dissatisfied with this categorization of
cultural elements; historical reconstructions also came to seem
increasingly speculative. Under the influence of several younger
scholars, a new approach came to predominate among British
anthropologists, concerned with analyzing how societies held
together in the present (synchronic
analysis, rather than diachronic
or historical analysis), and emphasizing long-term (one to several
years) immersion fieldwork. Cambridge
University financed a multidisciplinary expedition to the
Torres
Strait Islands in 1898, organized by Alfred Court Haddon and
including a physician-anthropologist, W. H. R.
Rivers, as well as a linguist, a botanist, other specialists.
The findings of the expedition set new standards for ethnographic
description.

A decade and a half later, Polish-born
anthropology student Bronisław
Malinowski (1884-1942) was beginning what he expected to be a
brief period of fieldwork in the old model,
collecting lists of cultural items, when the outbreak of the First
World War stranded him in New Guinea. As
a subject of the Austro-Hungarian Empire resident on a British
colonial possession, he was effectively confined to New Guinea for
several years. He made use of the time by undertaking far more
intensive fieldwork than had been done by British anthropologists,
and his classic ethnography,
Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922) advocated an approach
to fieldwork that
became standard in the field: getting "the native's point of view"
through participant
observation. Theoretically, he advocated a functionalist
interpretation, which examined how social institutions functioned
to meet individual needs.

A. R.
Radcliffe-Brown also published a seminal work in 1922. He had
carried out his initial fieldwork in the Andaman
Islands in the old style of historical reconstruction. However,
after reading the work of French sociologists Émile
Durkheim and Marcel
Mauss, Radcliffe-Brown published an account of his research
(entitled simply The Andaman Islanders) that paid close attention
to the meaning and purpose of rituals and myths. Over time, he
developed an approach known as structural-functionalism,
which focused on how institutions in societies worked to balance
out or create an equilibrium in the social system to keep it
functioning harmoniously. (This contrasted with Malinowski's
functionalism, and was quite different from the later French
structuralism, which examined the conceptual structures in
language and symbolism.)

Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown's influence
stemmed from the fact that they, like Boas, actively trained
students and aggressively built up institutions that furthered
their programmatic ambitions. This was particularly the case with
Radcliffe-Brown, who spread his agenda for "Social Anthropology" by
teaching at universities across the British
Commonwealth. From the late 1930s until the postwar period
appeared a string of monographs and edited volumes that cemented
the paradigm of British Social Anthropology (BSA). Famous
ethnographies include The Nuer, by
Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard, and The Dynamics of Clanship Among
the Tallensi, by Meyer
Fortes; well-known edited volumes include African Systems of
Kinship and Marriage and African Political Systems.

Max
Gluckman, together with many of his colleagues at the Rhodes-Livingstone
Institute and students at Manchester
University, collectively known as the
Manchester School, took BSA in new directions through their
introduction of explicitly Marxist-informed theory, their emphasis
on conflicts and conflict resolution, and their attention to the
ways in which individuals negotiate and make use of the social
structural possibilities.

In Britain, anthropology had a great intellectual
impact, it "contributed to the erosion of Christianity,
the growth of cultural
relativism, an awareness of the survival of the primitive in
modern life, and the replacement of diachronic
modes of analysis with synchronic,
all of which are central to modern culture."

Later in the 1960s and 1970s, Edmund Leach
and his students Mary Douglas
and Nur
Yalman, among others, introduced French structuralism in the
style of Lévi-Strauss;
while British anthropology has continued to emphasize social
organization and economics over purely symbolic or literary topics,
differences among British, French, and American sociocultural
anthropologies have diminished with increasing dialogue and
borrowing of both theory and methods. Today, social anthropology in
Britain engages internationally with many other social theories and
has branched in many directions.

Anthropology in the United States

1800s to 1940s

From its beginnings in the early 19th
century through the early 20th century, anthropology in the United
States was influenced by the presence of
Native American societies.

Cultural
anthropology in the United States was influenced greatly by the
ready availability of Native American societies as ethnographic
subjects. The field was pioneered by staff of the Bureau
of Indian Affairs and the Smithsonian Institution's
Bureau of American Ethnology, men such as John
Wesley Powell and Frank
Hamilton Cushing. Lewis
Henry Morgan (1818-1881), a lawyer from Rochester,
New York, became an advocate for and ethnological scholar of
the Iroquois. His
comparative analyses of religion, government, material culture, and
especially kinship patterns proved to be influential contributions
to the field of anthropology. Like other scholars of his day (such
as Edward
Tylor), Morgan argued that human societies could be classified
into categories of cultural evolution on a scale of progression
that ranged from savagery, to barbarism, to civilization.
Generally, Morgan used technology (such as bowmaking or pottery) as
an indicator of position on this scale.

Boasian anthropology

Franz Boas
established academic anthropology in the United States in
opposition to this sort of evolutionary perspective. Boasian
anthropology was politically active and suspicious of research
dictated by the U.S. government and wealthy patrons. It was
rigorously empirical and skeptical of overgeneralizations and
attempts to establish universal laws. Boas studied immigrant
children to demonstrate that biological race was not immutable, and
that human conduct and behavior resulted from nurture, rather than
nature.

Influenced by the German tradition, Boas argued
that the world was full of distinct cultures, rather than societies
whose evolution could be measured by how much or how little
"civilization" they had. He believed that each culture has to be
studied in its particularity, and argued that cross-cultural
generalizations, like those made in the natural
sciences, were not possible. In doing so, he fought
discrimination against immigrants, African Americans, and Native
North Americans. Many American anthropologists adopted his agenda
for social reform, and theories of race continue to be popular
targets for anthropologists today. The so-called "Four Field
Approach" has its origins in Boasian Anthropology, dividing the
discipline in the four crucial and interrelated fields of
sociocultural, biological, linguistic, and prehistoric anthropology
(i.e., archaeology). Anthropology in the U.S. continues to be
deeply influenced by the Boasian tradition, especially its emphasis
on culture.

The publication of Alfred
Kroeber's textbook, Anthropology, marked a turning point in
American anthropology. After three decades of amassing material,
Boasians felt a growing urge to generalize. This was most obvious
in the 'Culture and Personality' studies carried out by younger
Boasians such as Margaret
Mead and Ruth
Benedict. Influenced by psychoanalytic psychologists such as
Sigmund
Freud and Carl Jung,
these authors sought to understand the way that individual
personalities were shaped by the wider cultural and social forces
in which they grew up. Though such works as Coming of Age in Samoa
and The Chrysanthemum and the Sword remain popular with the
American public, Mead and Benedict never had the impact on the
discipline of anthropology that some expected. Boas had planned for
Ruth Benedict to succeed him as chair of Columbia's anthropology
department, but she was sidelined by Ralph
Linton, and Mead was limited to her offices at the
AMNH.

Anthropology in Canada

Canadian anthropology began, as in
other parts of the Colonial world, as ethnological data in the
records of travellers and missionaries. In Canada, Jesuitmissionaries
such as Fathers LeClercq, Le Jeune and Sagard, in the 1600s,
provide the oldest ethnographic records of native tribes in what
was then the Domain of Canada.

True anthropology began with a Government
department: the
Geological Survey of Canada, and George
Mercer Dawson (director in 1895). Dawson's support for
anthropology created impetus for the profession in Canada. This was
expanded upon by Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier, who established a
Division of Anthropology within the Geological Survey in 1910.
Anthropologists were recruited from England and the USA, setting
the foundation for the unique Canadian style of anthropology. Early
scholars include the brilliant linguist and Boasian, Edward
Sapir, also Oxford graduates
Marius
Barbeau and Diamond
Jenness. Born in rural Québec, Barbeau became a Rhodes scholar
and eventually a classmate of Jenness. The two studied under
Tylor and
Marett at
Oxford. In Canada, Barbeau and Jenness worked at the National
Museum (as it became known later). In 1944, Canada's first
home-grown anthropologist established the archive which has become
a key source of ethnographic and folklore material.

Following George Mercer Dawson (of McGill,
Montreal) and Franz Boas, Sapir and Barbeau
conducted ethnographic research and collected material culture from
the peoples of the Northwest Coast, especially Haida. Jenness is
best known for his research in the Arctic among the Copper
Inuit. However, in actuality, they all worked in a variety of
areas in Canada, recording traditions and songs, studying
languages, and collecting artifacts for the museum. They
essentially had sole responsibility for the development of the
profession in Canada from 1910 until 1925 when Sapir left. The
development was slow relative to expansion (due to the colonizing
needs) of Britain and the USA.

The first academic position in anthropology at a
Canadian university was awarded to Thomas McIlwraith at the
University of Toronto in 1925. The next universities to hire
anthropologists, UBC and McGill, did so only in 1947. The first PhD
in anthropology was granted in 1956, with only a few more being
granted until the late 1960s. The 1970s brought a boom in
university development and in professional anthropology, and by
1980 about 400 people with doctorates in anthropology were employed
in Canada, and many more with a master's degree. Harry Hawthorne
built the department at UBC and set a standard for the use of
anthropological research as a guide to public
policy in his classic report to the federal government,
coauthored by M.-A. Tremblay, "A Survey of the Contemporary Indians
of Canada" (1966, 1967).

Canadian Anthropology is characterized by a
combination of Americanist Boasian-influenced interest in Native
American tribes and peoples, British Anthropological concerns with
social function and process, and Francophone concerns with small,
rural and ethnically isolated community studies. Issues of
disparity, continuity and change, political-economy, environment
and cultural ecology, and personality, culture and symbolism
predominated the discourse from World War I to the Vietnam War
era.

Anthropology in France

Anthropology in France has a less
clear genealogy than the British and American traditions, in part
because many French writers influential in anthropology have been
trained or held faculty positions in sociology, philosophy, or
other fields rather than in anthropology. Most commentators
consider Marcel Mauss
(1872-1950), nephew of the influential sociologist Émile
Durkheim to be the founder of the French anthropological
tradition. Mauss belonged to Durkheim's Année
Sociologique group; and while Durkheim and others examined the
state of modern societies, Mauss and his collaborators (such as
Henri
Hubert and Robert
Hertz) drew on ethnography and philology to analyze societies
which were not as 'differentiated' as European nation states. Two
works by Mauss in particular proved to have enduring relevance:
Essay on
the Gift a seminal analysis of exchange and
reciprocity, and his Huxley lecture on the notion of the
person, the first comparative study of notions of person and
selfhood cross-culturally.

Throughout the interwar years, French interest in
anthropology often dovetailed with wider cultural movements such as
surrealism and
primitivism
which drew on ethnography for inspiration. Marcel
Griaule and Michel
Leiris are examples of people who combined anthropology with
the French avant-garde. During this time most of what is known as
ethnologie was restricted to museums, such as the Musée
de l'Homme founded by Paul Rivet,
and anthropology had a close relationship with studies of folklore.

Above all, however, it was Claude
Lévi-Strauss who helped institutionalize anthropology in
France. In addition to the enormous influence his structuralism exerted
across multiple disciplines, Lévi-Strauss established ties with
American and British anthropologists. At the same time he
established centers and laboratories within France to provide an
institutional context within anthropology while training
influential students such as Maurice
Godelier and Françoise
Héritier who would prove influential in the world of French
anthropology. Much of the distinct character of France's
anthropology today is a result of the fact that most anthropology
is carried out in nationally funded research laboratories (CNRS)
rather than academic departments in universities.

Other influential writers in the 1970s include
Pierre
Clastres, who explains in his books on the Guayaki tribe in
Paraguay
that "primitive societies" actively oppose the institution of the
state. Therefore, these
stateless societies are not less evolved than societies with
states, but took the active choice of conjuring the institution of
authority as a
separate function from society. The leader is only a
spokesperson for the group when it has to deal with other groups
("international relations") but has no inside authority, and may be
violently removed if he attempts to abuse this position.

The most important French social theorist since
Foucault and Lévi-Strauss is Pierre
Bourdieu, who trained formally in philosophy and sociology and
eventually held the Chair of Sociology at the Collège de France.
Like Mauss and others before him, however, he worked on topics both
in sociology and anthropology. His fieldwork among the Kabyles of
Algeria places him solidly in anthropology, while his analysis of
the function and reproduction of fashion and cultural capital in
European societies places him as solidly in sociology.

Other countries

Anthropology in Greece and Portugal is much
influenced by British anthropology. In Greece, there was
since the 19th century a science of the folklore called laographia
(laography), in the form of "a science of the interior", although
theoretically weak; but the connotation of the field deeply changed
after World War II, when a wave of Anglo-American anthropologists
introduced a science "of the outside". In Italy, the
development of ethnology and related studies
did not receive as much attention as other branches of
learning.

Germany and
Norway are
the countries that showed the most division and conflict between
scholars focusing on domestic socio-cultural issues and scholars
focusing on "other" societies.

Anthropology after World War II: Increasing dialogue in
Anglophone anthropology

Before WWII
British 'social anthropology' and American 'cultural anthropology'
were still distinct traditions. After the war, enough British and
American anthropologists borrowed ideas and methodlogical
approaches from each other that some began to speak of them
collectively as 'sociocultural' anthropology.

Structuralism also influenced a number of
developments in 1960s and 1970s, including
cognitive anthropology and componential analysis. Authors such
as
David Schneider, Clifford
Geertz, and Marshall
Sahlins developed a more fleshed-out concept of culture as a
web of meaning or signification, which proved very popular within
and beyond the discipline. In keeping with the times, much of
anthropology became politicized through the
Algerian War of Independence and opposition to the Vietnam War;
Marxism
became a more and more popular theoretical approach in the
discipline. By the 1970s the authors of volumes such as Reinventing
Anthropology worried about anthropology's relevance.

In the late 1980s and 1990s authors such as
George
Marcus and James
Clifford pondered ethnographic authority, particularly how and
why anthropological knowledge was possible and authoritative. They
were reflecting trends in research and discourse initiated by
Feminists in the academy, although they excused themselves from
commenting specifically on those pioneering critics. Nevertheless,
key aspects of feminist theorsing and methods became de rigueur as
part of the 'post-modern moment' in anthropology: Ethnographies
became more reflexive, explicitly addressing the author's
methodology, cultural, gender and racial positioning, and their
influence on his or her ethnographic analysis. This was part of a
more general trend of postmodernism that was
popular contemporaneously. Currently anthropologists pay attention
to a wide variety of issues pertaining to the contemporary world,
including globalization, medicine and biotechnology,
indigenous rights, virtual
communities, and the anthropology of industrialized
societies.

Approaches to anthropology

The "four field" approach

Principally in the United States,
anthropology is often defined as being "holistic" and based on a
"four-field" approach. There is an ongoing dispute as to whether
this makes sense theoretically or pragmatically in the structure of
American academic institutions. Supporters consider anthropology
holistic in two senses: it is concerned with all human beings
across times and places, and with all dimensions of humanity
(evolutionary, biophysical, sociopolitical, economic, cultural,
linguistic, psychological, etc.); also many academic programs
following this approach take a "four-field" approach to
anthropology that encompasses physical
anthropology, archaeology, linguistics, and cultural
anthropology or social
anthropology. The definition of anthropology as holistic and the "four-field"
approach are disputed by some leading anthropologists, that
consider those as artifacts from 19th century social
evolutionary thought that inappropriately impose scientific
positivism upon
cultural
anthropology in particular. (for more details see the section
on the relations with the natural sciences and the
Humanities)

Socio-cultural anthropology is the investigation, often through
long term, intensive field studies (including
participant-observation methods), of the culture and social
organization of a particular people: language, economic and
political organization, law and conflict resolution, patterns of
consumption and exchange, kinship and family structure,
gender relations, childrearing and socialization, religion,
mythology, symbolism, etc. (U.S. universities more often use the
term cultural
anthropology; British universities have tended to call the
corresponding field social
anthropology, and for much of the 20th century emphasized the
analysis of social organization more than cultural symbolism.) In
some European countries, socio-cultural anthropology is known as
ethnology (a term
coined and defined by
Adam F. Kollár in 1783 that is also used in English-speaking
countries to denote the comparative aspect of socio-cultural
anthropology.) Subfields and related fields include psychological
anthropology, folklore, anthropology
of religion, ethnic
studies, cultural
studies, anthropology
of media and cyberspace,
and study of the diffusion
of social practices and cultural forms.

Archaeology
studies the contemporary distribution and form of artifacts
(materials modified by past human activities), with the intent of
understanding distribution and movement of ancient populations,
development of human social organization, and relationships among
contemporary populations; it also contributes significantly to the
work of population geneticists, historical linguists, and many
historians. Archaeology involves a wide variety of field techniques
(remote sensing, survey, geophysical studies, coring, excavation)
and laboratory procedures (compositional analyses, dating studies
(radiocarbon,
optically
stimulated luminescence dating), measures of formal
variability, examination of wear patterns, residue analyses, etc.).
Archaeologists predominantly study materials produced by
prehistoric groups but also includes modern, historical and
ethnographic populations. Archaeology is usually regarded as a
separate (but related) field outside North America, although
closely related to the anthropological field of material
culture, which deals with physical objects created or used
within a living or past group as a means of understanding its
cultural values.

A number of subfields or modes of anthropology
cut across these divisions. For example, medical
anthropology is often considered a subfield of socio-cultural
anthropology; however, many anthropologists who study medical
topics also look at biological variation in populations or the
interaction of culture and biology. They may also use linguistic
analysis to understand communication around health and illness, or
archaeological techniques to understand health and illness in
historical or prehistorical populations. Similarly, forensic
anthropologists may use both techniques from both physical
anthropology and archaeology, and may also practice as medical
anthropologists. Environmental or ecological
anthropology, a growing subfield concerned with the
relationships between humans and their environment, is another
example that brings cultural and biological—and at times,
archaeological—approaches together, as it can deal with a broad
range of topics from environmentalist
movements to wildlife
or habitat
conservation to traditional ecological knowledge and practices.
Biocultural
anthropology is a broad term used to describe syntheses of
cultural and biological perspectives. Applied
anthropology is perhaps better considered an emphasis than a
subfield in the same sense as the standard four; applied
anthropologists may work for government agencies, nongovernmental
agencies, or private industry, using techniques from any of the
subfields to address matters such as policy implementation, impact
assessments, education, marketing research, or product
development.

More recently, anthropology programs at several
prominent U.S. universities have begun dividing the field into two:
one emphasizing the humanities, critical
theory, and interpretive or semiotic approaches; the other
emphasizing evolutionary
theory, quantitive methods, and explicit theory testing (over
idiographic description), though there have also been institutional
pressures to rejoin at least one high-profile split department. At
some universitities, biological anthropology and archaeology
programs have also moved from departments of anthropology to
departments of biology or other related fields. This has occasioned
much discussion within the
American Anthropological Association, and it remains to be seen
whether some form of the four-field organization will persist in
North American universities.

As might be inferred from the above list of
subfields, anthropology is a methodologically diverse discipline,
incorporating both qualitative
methods and quantitative
methods. Ethnographies—intensive
case
studies based on field research—have historically had a central
place in the literature of sociocultural and linguistic
anthropology, but are increasingly supplemented by mixed-methods
approaches. Currently, technological advancements are spurring
methodological innovation across anthropology's subfields. Radiocarbon
dating, population
genetics, GPS, and digital video-
and audio-recording are just a few of the many technologies
spurring new developments in anthropological research.

Controversies about the history of anthropology

Anthropologists, like other researchers (esp.
historians and scientists engaged in field research), have over
time assisted state policies and projects, especially
colonialism.

Some commentators have contended:

That the discipline grew out of colonialism, perhaps was in
league with it, and derived some of its key notions from it,
consciously or not. (See, for example, Gough, Pels and Salemink,
but cf. Lewis 2004).

That anthropologists typically have more power than the people
they study and hence their knowledge-making is a form of theft in
which the anthropologist gains something for him or herself at the
expense of informants.

That ethnographic work was often ahistorical, writing about
people as if they were "out of time" in an "ethnographic present"
(Johannes
Fabian, Time and Its Other).

Anthropology and the military

Anthropologists’ involvement with the U.S.
government, in particular, has caused bitter controversy within the
discipline. Franz Boas publicly objected to US participation in
World
War I, and after the war he published a brief expose and
condemnation of the participation of several American archeologists
in espionage in Mexico under their cover as scientists. But by the
1940s, many of Boas' anthropologist contemporaries were active in
the allied war effort against the "Axis" (Nazi Germany, Fascist
Italy, and Imperial Japan). Many served in the armed forces but
others worked in intelligence (for example,
Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and the
Office of War Information). At the same time, David H.
Price's work on American anthropology during the Cold War
provides detailed accounts of the pursuit and dismissal of several
anthropologists from their jobs for communist sympathies.

Attempts to accuse anthropologists of complicity
with the CIA and government intelligence activities during the
Vietnam War years have turned up surprisingly little (although
anthropologist Hugo Nutini was active in the stillborn Project
Camelot). Many anthropologists (students and teachers) were
active in the antiwar movement and a great many resolutions
condemning the war in all its aspects were passed overwhelmingly at
the annual meetings of the
American Anthropological Association (AAA). In the decades
since the Vietnam war the tone of cultural and social anthropology,
at least, has been increasingly politicized, with the dominant
liberal tone of earlier generations replaced with one more radical,
a mix of, and varying degrees of, Marxist, feminist, anarchist,
post-colonial, post-modern, Saidian, Foucauldian, identity-based,
and more.

Professional anthropological bodies often object
to the use of anthropology for the benefit of the state. Their codes of ethics or
statements may proscribe anthropologists from giving secret
briefings. The
Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and
Commonwealth (ASA ) has called certain scholarships ethically
dangerous. The AAA's current 'Statement of Professional
Responsibility' clearly states that "in relation with their own
government and with host governments … no secret research, no
secret reports or debriefings of any kind should be agreed to or
given."

Major discussions about anthropology

Focus on "other cultures"

Some authors argue that
anthropology originated and developed as the study of "other
cultures", both in terms of time (past societies) and space
(non-European/non-Western
societies). For example, the classic of urban
anthropology, Ulf Hannerz
in the introduction to his seminal Exploring the City: Inquiries
Toward an Urban Anthropology mentions that the "Third World"
had habitually received most of attention; anthropologists who
traditionally specialized in "other cultures" looked for them far
away and started to look "across the tracks" only in late 1960s.
Now there exist many works focusing on peoples and topics very
close to the author's "home".

In France, the study of existing contemporary
society has been traditionally left to sociologists, but this is
increasingly changing, starting in the 1970s from scholars like
Isac
Chiva and journals like Terrain
("fieldwork"), and developing with the center founded by Marc Augé
(Le
Centre d'anthropologie des mondes contemporains, the
Anthropological Research Center of Contemporary Societies). The
same approach of focusing on "modern world" topics by Terrain, was
also present in the British
Manchester School of the 1950s.

It has been reported that there has been an
"institutional and academic apartheid" between the two
sorts of anthropology, the one focusing on the "Other" and the one
focusing on the "Self" contemporary society; an apartheid ranging
from a "no contact" status to even open conflict. The countries
where this was greater were Germany and Norway, but it was also
significant in the 1980s France.